INTRO: The World Is Loud, But You Don’t Have…

Some cities don’t have a “bad side.” They have a side that was quietly sacrificed — carved up by highways, boxed in by banks, and written off by people who never lived there. And the wild part is, the decline didn’t start with crime or chaos. It started with paperwork. A few strokes of a pen turned whole neighborhoods into “no‑go zones” for investment, opportunity, and basic respect.
Then America had the nerve to point at the fallout and say,
“See? That’s why it’s the bad part of town.”
But the truth is simple:
Nothing about these neighborhoods was doomed.
They were designed to struggle — and then blamed for struggling.